It is desired in the textile industry to create products that are 100 percent recyclable with minimum difficulty. Today's commercially provided carpet products are predominantly manufactured using a latex based binder to adhere the backing scrim to the carpet fibers. The purpose of the scrim and latex are to bind the carpet fibers and prevent the fibers from becoming unwoven or loose. The latex is undesirable from a recycling point of view. In order to reclaim the carpet fibers and scrim, which are normally polypropylene, polyester, or polyamide based, the latex has to be separated from the total composite.
A method of making and recycling carpet of all recyclable material has been disclosed. The disclosed carpet includes a primary backing having tufts of synthetic carpet fibers protruding from a top surface and, optionally, a secondary backing, with an extruded sheet of an isotactic polyolefin polymer between and integrally fused to a bottom surface of the primary backing and an upper surface of the secondary backing. The isotactic polyolefin polymers shown to be effective to fuse the carpet fibers and the secondary backing in the disclosure are isotactic polypropylene and extruded blends of polypropylene with polyethylene, polybutylene and thermoplastic elastomers. The previous disclosures teach that polyethylene copolymers alone are a poor choice for such a fusion material. Furthermore, it has been disclosed that if anything other than polypropylene is used for the face fiber, extruded sheet and secondary back, that the bonding of the materials must be physically separated before recycling can take place.
In contrast, in the present invention, the use of ethylene methyl acrylate copolymers as such a fusion material replacement for latex conventionally used to bind carpet fibers to backing material not only eliminates the need for a separation recovery process but also enhances the total products' performance when recycled. Furthermore, such a copolymer has advantages over polypropylene and the various polypropylene blends previously disclosed.